Giant ‘bubbles’ to help beat smog in China?

BEIJING: A London-based architecture and design company co-founded by an Indian has come up with a new solution called "Bubbles" to combat the increasing air pollution in China.

Their project which is still in the conceptual stage, would be able to create outdoor green spaces which would be covered by giant bubble-shaped domes in the Chinese cities where adverse environmental conditions mean that people are unable to spend time outdoors without risking their health.

The architectural concept "bubble" will be in the form of a covered botanical garden, retail and office complex under a giant transparent roof.

"Bubbles structure encloses a botanical garden offered a giant balloon with filtered air with controlled temperature and humidity throughout the year," Rajat Sodhi, co-founder of the Orproject, an architecture practice with offices in London, Beijing and New Delhi told the South China Morning Post.

Bubbles is based on the principles of biomimetic architecture, typically lightweight environmental structures inspired by nature.

The geometry of the Bubbles canopy was generated using an algorithm that simulates the development of veins in leaves or in butterfly wings, he said.

"It's just an infrastructure project like building metro stations and parks — it's applicable in every dense, polluted metropolis where there's a need for open, green spaces throughout the year," he said.

22.10 | 0 komentar | Read More

Bug killing chemical in soaps and toothpastes may promote Staph infections: Study

NEW DELHI: In a bizarre twist, scientists have found that a bacteria killing chemical added to many soaps, shampoos and toothpastes may end up promoting the growth of another bacteria in the nose.

Triclosan, the anti-microbial chemical finds its way into human noses where it promotes the colonization of Staphylococcus aureus bacteria and could predispose some people to infection.

These findings were reported by researchers at the University of Michigan this week in a study published in mBio®, the online open-access journal of the American Society for Microbiology.

"It's really common in hand soaps, toothpastes and mouthwashes but there's no evidence it does a better job than regular soap," said Blaise Boles, senior study author and an assistant professor of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at the university . "This agent may have unintended consequences in our bodies. It could promote S. aureus nasal colonization, putting some people at increased risk for infection."

Staphylococcus aureus, popularly known as Staph, causes skin infections, boils and pimples, respiratory diseases, sinusitis etc. Its anti-biotic resistant strain called MRSA causes deadly infections, especially in institutional conditions like hospitals and prisons. Such infections are very difficult to treat.

Triclosan, a human-made compound used in a range of antibacterial personal care products such as soaps, toothpastes, kitchen surfaces, clothes and medical equipment, was found in nasal passages of 41% of adults sampled, according to a report by the American Society for Microbiology. A higher proportion of subjects with triclosan also had S. aureus colonization. S. aureus could promote infection in some populations such as people undergoing surgery.

Triclosan has been around for the past 40 years, according to Boles, and has been incorporated into many antibacterial household products within the past decade. Other studies have found traces of triclosan in human fluids including serum, urine and milk, and studies in mammals have found that high concentrations of triclosan can disrupt the endocrine system and decrease heart and skeletal muscle function.

Additional experiments found that S. aureus grown in the presence of triclosan was better able to attach to human proteins, and that rats exposed to triclosan were more susceptible to S. aureus nasal colonization.

"In light of the significant use of triclosan in consumer products and its widespread environmental contamination, our data combined with previous studies showing impacts of triclosan on the endocrine system and muscle function suggest that a reevaluation of triclosan in consumer products is urgently needed," the authors wrote.

The study was funded by the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

22.10 | 0 komentar | Read More

Indian-origin scientist creates $5 chemistry set

WASHINGTON: An Indian-origin scientist has developed a tiny chemistry set which only costs $5 and can be used to test water quality and provide affordable medical diagnostic tests in the developing world.

Manu Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, has won $50,000 to further develop his prototype into a low-cost product, which he thinks can have widespread use both in the developing world and as a creative toy for kids.

The idea for the device came to Prakash from a toy music box. The box used a tiny hand crank to pull a paper ribbon through a set of pins on concentric disks.

When one of the pins hit a hole in the paper, the disk and pin rotated, causing another pin to pluck a metal strip to make a sound.

Prakash got the idea that the rotating pins could also be used to pump fluids through tiny channels or to control valves and droplet generators in a programmable fashion.

After talking with graduate student George Korir, Prakash started working with him on a way of pairing the hand-cranked toy with a small silicon chip containing tiny channels for manipulating fluids.

Like the music box, the prototype chemistry set includes a hand-cranked wheel and paper tape with periodic holes punched by the user.

When a pin encounters a hole in the tape it flips and activates a pump that releases a single drop from a channel. In the simplest design, 15 independent pumps, valves and droplet generators can all be controlled simultaneously.

The portable, programmable chemistry kit could be used around the world to test water quality, provide affordable medical diagnostic tests, assess soil chemistry for agriculture or serve as a snake bite venom test kit.

It could even be used in modern labs to carry out experiments on a very small scale.

Although the original prototype was made from music box parts, Prakash and Korir have many versions in which the crank and pins (they call this part the actuator) were printed on a 3-D printer.

They said the actuator, the paper tape and the silicon chip can all be modified to meet different uses, and can be made from inexpensive, durable materials costing less than $5.

With the prize money from The Science Play and Research Kit Competition (SPARK), Prakash and Korir hope to continue working toward a product that other groups, including researchers and citizen scientists, can then modify and programme for a wide range of uses, both educational and scientific.

Prakash has also developed a low-cost microscope called Foldscope that can be folded like origami out of paper.

22.10 | 0 komentar | Read More

Dark matter found? Gamma rays at centre of Milky Way promise clue to mystery of universe

Scientists in Boston have released an image which they say could be the first time dark matter has ever been captured on a Nasa telescope.

The new study of gamma rays captured by the US space agency's Fermi apparatus picked up a signal which "cannot be explained by other alternatives" - meaning that by process of elimination what we are seeing has a high chance of being the elusive substance.

Dark matter makes up most of the material universe - yet we know very little about what it consists of or how it interacts with everything else.

But by analyzing an image of gamma rays coming from the Milky Way, a joint team from Harvard, the University of Chicago and MIT in Boston have been able to pick out a bright core at the centre of our galaxy that is only currently explained by models of dark matter itself.

Experts have speculated for some time that dark matter is most likely to be observed at the centre of the galaxy - large quantities of dark matter attract normal matter, forming a foundation upon which visible structures, such as galaxies, are built.

"This is the most compelling signal we've had for dark matter particles - ever," said Dan Hooper, speaking to New Scientist from the Fermi National Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.

"At this point, there are no known or proposed astrophysical mechanisms or sources that can account for this emission," he said. "That doesn't rule out things that no one's thought of yet, but we've tried pretty hard to think of something without success."

The team took publicly available images of gamma ray light shot out from the Milky Way and, piece by piece, removed every pixel that could be explained by a known phenomenon like a supernova or particles colliding with interstellar gas.

The team took publicly available images of gamma ray light shot out from the Milky Way and, piece by piece, removed every pixel that could be explained by a known phenomenon like a supernova or particles colliding with interstellar gas.

"Our case is very much a process-of-elimination argument. We made a list, scratched off things that didn't work, and ended up with dark matter," said co-author Douglas Finkbeiner, a professor of astronomy and physics at Harvard.

One possible theory suggests that dark matter is made up of brilliantly named Weakly Interacting Massive Particles - or Wimps - which would collide to produce gamma rays at the energies detected by the Fermi telescope.

Tracy Slatyer, a theoretical physicist at MIT, said: "This is a very exciting signal, and while the case is not yet closed, in the future we might well look back and say this was where we saw dark matter annihilation for the first time."

22.10 | 0 komentar | Read More

Paralyzed patients regain movement after spinal implant: Study

NEW YORK: Four men who had each been paralyzed from the chest down for more than two years and been told their situation was hopeless regained the ability to voluntarily move their legs and feet, though not to walk, after an electrical device was implanted in their spines, researchers reported on Tuesday.

The success, albeit in a small number of patients, offers hope that a fundamentally new treatment can help many of the 6 million paralyzed Americans, including the 1.3 million with spinal cord injuries. Even those whose cases are deemed so hopeless they are not offered further rehabilitation might benefit, scientists say.

The results also cast doubt on a key assumption about spinal cord injury: that treatment requires damaged neurons to regrow or be replaced with, for instance, stem cells. Both approaches have proved fiendishly difficult and, in the case of stem cells, controversial.

"The big message here is that people with spinal cord injury of the type these men had no longer need to think they have a lifelong sentence of paralysis," Dr Roderic Pettigrew, director of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, part of the National Institutes of Health, said in an interview. "They can achieve some level of voluntary function," which he called "a milestone" in spinal cord injury research. His institute partly funded the study, which was published in the journal Brain.

The partial recovery achieved by "hopeless" patients suggests that physicians and rehabilitation therapists may be giving up on millions of paralyzed people. That's because physical therapy can mimic some aspects of the electrical stimulation that the device provided, said Susan Harkema, a specialist in neurological rehab at the University of Louisville's Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center (KSCIRC), who led the new study.

"One of the things this research shows is that there is more potential for spinal cord injury patients to recover even without this electrical stimulation," she said in an interview. "Today, patients are not given rehab because they are not considered 'good investments.' We should rethink what they're offered, because rehabilitation can drive recovery for many more than are receiving it."

BASEBALL STAR

The research built on the case of a single paralyzed patient that Harkema's team reported in 2011. College baseball star Rob Summers had been injured in a hit-and-run accident in 2006, paralyzing him below the neck.

In late 2009, Summers received the epidural implant just below the damaged area. The 2.5-ounce (72-gram) device began emitting electrical current at varying frequencies and intensities, stimulating dense bundles of neurons in the spinal cord. Three days later he stood on his own. In 2010 he took his first tentative steps.

His partial recovery became a media sensation, but even the Louisville team thought that epidural stimulation could benefit only spinal cord patients who had some sensation in their paralyzed limbs, as Summers did. "We assumed that the surviving sensory pathways were crucial for this recovery," Harkema said.

She and her team had little hope for two of their next patients. Neither had sensation in their paralyzed legs.

One was Kent Stephenson, who had been paralyzed in a 2009 motocross crash when he was 21. After months of rehab in Colorado, "they said I would never move my legs again, and there was no hope," he said.

Eleven days after he began receiving the deck-of-cards-size RestoreAdvanced stimulator, which is made by Medtronic and used for pain control, Stephenson moved his "paralyzed" left leg while lying on his back.

"My mom, who was in the room when they turned the stimulator on and told me, 'Pull your left leg up,' cried when I did it," Stephenson said. "I got a little watery-eyed, too. I'd been told I'd never move voluntarily again."

The researchers didn't expect him to, either, said Claudia Angeli of the Frazier Rehab Institute and KSCIRC, who co-led the study: "So when Kent moved, we thought, huh, this might actually be working."

Andrew Meas, whose head-on collision with a car while he was riding home on his motorcycle in 2006 left him paralyzed from the chest down, made even more progress. He can move even when the stimulator is not emitting electrical signals.

The first time he was able to move his legs "it made me feel like a normal person again," he said. After months of rehab post-implant, "I can pick up both my legs without the stimulator on, and can also stand without it. My record is 27 minutes, and I'm still progressing."

At first, Meas could move his legs only when the implant's 16 electrodes were zapping their spinal neurons at full power. Over 28 weeks of daily physical therapy, he gradually became able to move his toes, feet, ankles, knees, legs and hips with less electrical stimulation.

ELECTRICAL BARRAGE

Meas's experience offers clues to how epidural stimulation works in patients with spinal cord injury. Just as continuous exposure to an allergen can eventually make people so sensitized that they sneeze and wheeze at a single grain of pollen, so the electrical barrage "resets the level of excitability of spinal cord neurons," said NIH's Pettigrew. As a result, "even input from exercise could be enough to trigger a motor response."

In addition to regaining voluntary movement, the patients put on muscle mass and felt less tired and generally happier. Summers is coaching baseball. Stephenson goes whitewater rafting and motocrossing in a sidecar.

Even researchers who have pioneered competing approaches, using cells, praised the new work. "It's not a cure," said Dr Barth Green, a neurosurgeon at the University of Miami, whose Miami Project to Cure Paralysis is trying to treat spinal cord patients with cell transplants. "But it could be part of a combined biological and bioengineering strategy to help patients not just walk again but also gain control of their bowel and bladder," which many paralyzed patients identify as even more important to their quality of life.

The Louisville researchers suspect that with better stimulator technology, spinal cord patients will be able to "work toward stepping," as they carefully phrase it to avoid the hype associated with "walking again." The electrodes in the current device must either be all on or all off, for instance; alternately stimulating the left and right sides might be more effective.

The bioengineering institute at NIH is funding research to develop noninvasive stimulators. That way, the electrical pulses can be delivered through the skin rather than requiring surgery to implant a device, Pettigrew said.

Even in patients with severe spinal cord injuries, and even after experts have pronounced them incapable of recovery, "we believe there is still a capacity for recovery," Harkema said. "It's not necessarily the case that you will never move again."

22.10 | 0 komentar | Read More

Couch potatoes date back 7,000 years

LONDON: Thought couch potatoes are the product of a modern lifestyle? They may have evolved 7,000 years ago!

A new Cambridge study has shown that couch potatoes have a history that stretches back 7,000 years when humans first picked up the plough.

Research into lower limb bones shows that our early farming ancestors in Central Europe became less active as their tasks diversified and technology improved.

Cambridge University anthropologist Alison Macintosh found that this drop in mobility was particularly marked in men.

Macintosh shows that after the emergence of agriculture in Central Europe from around 5300 BC, the bones of those living in the fertile soils of the Danube river valley became progressively less strong, pointing to a decline in mobility and loading.

Macintosh suggests that male mobility among earliest farmers (around 7,300 years ago) was, on average, at a level near that of today's student cross-country runners.

Within just over 3,000 years, average mobility had dropped to the level of those students rated as sedentary, after which the decline slowed.

Macintosh laser-scanned skeletons found in cemeteries across Central Europe.

The earliest skeletons she examined date from around 5300 BC and the most recent from around 850 AD - a time span of 6,150 years.

Using a portable desktop 3D laser surface scanner to scan femora and tibiae, she found that male tibiae became less rigid and that bones in both males and females became less strengthened to loads in one direction more than another, such as front-to-back in walking.

These findings all indicate a drop in mobility. In other words, it is likely that the people to whom the skeletons belonged became, over generations, less intensely active and probably covered less distance, or carried out less physically demanding tasks, than those who had lived before them.

"My results suggest that, following the transition to agriculture in Central Europe, males were more affected than females by cultural and technological changes that reduced the need for long-distance travel or heavy physical work," said Macintosh.

"This also means that, as people began to specialize in tasks other than just farming and food production, such as metalworking, fewer people were regularly doing tasks that were very strenuous on their legs," Macintosh said.

22.10 | 0 komentar | Read More

Eco-friendly cement from old toilets?

WASHINGTON: Discarded toilets, along with other ceramic waste such as basins, stoneware and bricks, can be recycled into an eco-friendly form of cement, scientists say.

The method involves grinding the ceramic waste and mixing it with an activator solution and water. The mixture is then poured into a mould and subjected to a high-temperature hardening process. Researchers conducted tests with items made from red-clay brick waste and found the cement was actually stronger than types that are currently in common use, 'Gizmag' reported. They are still evaluating the strength of cement made with other forms of ceramic waste.

Currently, researchers are using sodium hydroxide or sodium silicate as activators. The researchers, from Spain's Universitat Politecnica de Valencia and Universitat Jaume I de Castellon, Imperial College of London, and the Universidade Estadual Paulista of Sao Paulo in Brazil Spain, the UK and Brazil, are looking into using rice husk ash as an activator. If it could be used, the result would be a cement made entirely from waste materials. The eco-friendly cement could be used as an alternative to Portland cement, which is the world's most widely used form of cement, they said. Production of Portland cement releases large amounts of carbon dioxide, and the material is considered a major contributor to global warming.

22.10 | 0 komentar | Read More

Experimental breast cancer drug shows promising results, Pfizer says

WASHINGTON: Pfizer says an experimental drug has shown encouraging results in treating advanced breast cancer in an early clinical trial.

The world's second largest drugmaker says the drug prevented breast cancer from worsening for 20.2 months in a trial involving 165 patients. Current medications do so for 10.2 months.

The drug is known as palbociclib. It's among a new class of cancer drugs that target specific proteins to block tumors.

University of Michigan business professor Erik Gordon studies the biomedical industry. Gordon isn't affiliated with the trial, and he says the outcome wasn't as positive as some initial results reported earlier in the trial.

But he says, "there's been a lot of hope surrounding this class of cancer drugs, and this keeps that hope alive."

22.10 | 0 komentar | Read More

Drinking milk may stave off arthritis in women

WASHINGTON: Women who frequently consume fat-free or low-fat milk may delay the progression of osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee, a new study has claimed.

The study also found that women who ate cheese actually saw an increase in knee OA progression but yogurt did not impact OA progression in men or women.

OA is a common, degenerative joint disease that causes pain and swelling of joints in the hand, hips, or knee.

While medical evidence points to obesity, joint injury, and repetitive use from some sports as risk factors for incident knee OA, risks associated with OA progression remain unclear.

"Milk consumption plays an important role in bone health," said lead author Bing Lu, from Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

"Our study is the largest study to investigate the impact of dairy intake in the progression of knee OA," Lu said.

For the study, 2,148 participants (3,064 knees) with knee OA were recruited. At the start of the study dietary data was collected and joint space width was measured by x-ray to evaluate OA progression.

Subjects included 888 men and 1,260 women who were followed-up at 12, 24, 36, and 48 months.

As the intake of milk increased from none to less than 3, 4-6, and more than 7 glasses per week, the joint space width in women also decreased by 0.38mm, 0.29mm,0.29mm and 0.26mm, respectively.

Results persisted even after adjusting for disease severity, body mass index (BMI) and dietary factors. No association between milk consumption and joint space width decrease was reported in men.

"Our findings indicate that women who frequently drink milk may reduce the progression of OA," said Lu.

The results were published in the American College of Rheumatology (ACR) journal, Arthritis Care & Research.

22.10 | 0 komentar | Read More

New heart valve does not require open surgery

WASHINGTON: Doctors in the US have implanted a newly approved aortic heart valve device in a patient that does not require open surgery.

The device, approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), is called the Medtronic CoreValve System.

On March 28, Loyola University Medical Centre became the first Illinois hospital to implant the device in a patient who was not part of a clinical trial.

The new device is deployed with a catheter, which is inserted in an artery in the groin and guided up to the heart.

Once in place, the artificial valve takes over the function of a diseased valve. The system is much less invasive than traditional open-heart surgery.

Loyola physicians also have implanted the device in patients participating in clinical trials, including a landmark trial.

The study found that patients who received the device had significantly lower mortality than heart valve patients who underwent open-heart surgery.

"This is a major breakthrough," said Fred Leya, co-principal investigator at the Loyola site, along with Mamdouh Bakhos.

The study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, included 795 seriously ill heart-valve patients who were randomly assigned to receive the new device or to undergo open-heart surgery.

After one year, the mortality rate was 19.1 per cent in the group that underwent open-heart surgery, but only 14.2 per cent in the group that received the new device.

After 30 days, quality-of-life scores improved 19 points for patients who received the new device, compared with 3.7 points for open-surgery patients.

At the one-year mark, quality-of-life scores increased 23.2 points in the device group and 21.9 points in the open-heart surgery group.

Quality of life is measured on a 100-point scale, in which 5 points is considered important and 20 points is considered a very large improvement.

Aortic stenosis occurs when the heart's aortic valve is narrowed, restricting blood flow from the heart to the body. The valve doesn't open properly, forcing the heart to work harder to pump blood.

Symptoms include fatigue, dizziness, chest pain/pressure, heart murmur, shortness of breath during activity, heart palpitations and fainting.

Aortic stenosis can lead to heart failure and death, researchers said.

The FDA approved the device in January 2014 to treat patients with severe aortic stenosis who are too ill or frail to have their aortic valves replaced through open-heart surgery.

Such patients have a nearly 50 per cent risk of death at the one-year mark unless they are treated.

22.10 | 0 komentar | Read More